Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason

Bridget is back and she's fatter than ever.

Ooops! Better say anaemically challenged.

This is not the story of a large girl who shares her bulbous bits with "a sex god" and has "ecstatic shags". That's what she wants you to think. Whenever you glimpse her insatiable lover between the sheets, he's as rampant as a stuffed moose. Something's not quite knicker pressed, as they used to say in the Fourth Form dorm.

Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the orgasmic deity of Ms Jones's damper dreams, folds his underpants before going to bed, is a human rights lawyer and never talks about his feelings. A typical upper-class emotionally dysfunctional ex-public school male you might think and you would be right. Bridget thinks otherwise, naturally, but then she lives off her imagination - viz the diaries.

The second instalment in the thirtysomething life of an insecure potential obsessive, who somehow has attractive men fighting over her, is well-honed, handcrafted, unapologetically romantic, rude and even, for pity's sake, funny. BJ One set the mould; BJ Two pours effortlessly into same.

You might be forgiven for not paying attention to the plot. It's the girl and her "shagalongs" that matter. Suffice to say that she's so screwed up, she imagines Darcy is spreading it around, has a row and boots him out. She goes off to Thailand with arch smoothie love rat Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) to make a TV arts programme and ends up in a Bangkok jail, accused of drug smuggling. The rest is a matter of pulling it all together again.

The script by Helen Fielding and friends (Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis, Adam Brooks) is barbed with unzipped one-liners. Renee Zellweger gives an inspired comic performance and her antics on the ski slopes are particularly well observed. Firth is immaculately buttoned up and Grant delightfully flirtatious, although there is not enough of either.

One question consistently nags. Why is everyone falling in love with Bridget when she's let her looks go to pot and appears in word, deed and fashion air-brained?